It’s bad enough being lost when you’re walking somewhere, but worse still in a taxi or tuk tuk because then you really are powerless, at the mercy of a stranger who may see you as more than a normal customer whose only interest is being brought from A to B. He may view you as a potential meal ticket, and he may be wondering how big a meal he can make out of you. For example, on our second night, we went through the highly complex procedure of negotiating a price for a tuk tuk to take us to a dance school about three kilometres away. We bargained the price down though, some kind of self-appointed taxi wallah "controlling" the tuk tuks at our corner. We negotiated the cost from the obscenely expensive to the merely exorbitant.

Our driver, who claimed to be a refugee from Afghanistan, used his feeble English to provide us with an unwanted potted version of his life story. About half way through the journey, he pulled over and told us he wanted to bring us shopping in a place where we would find many bargains. We said we didn’t want to go shopping and gently encouraged him to bring us to our agreed destination. He was not taking "no" for an answer. He explained that he needed us to go shopping with him to get a kickback from the shopkeeper for bringing foreigners into his shop. He kept tapping my forearm with his oily fingers, believing this would make his point more forcibly, unaware of how uncomfortable I find physical contact from strangers, especially strange aggressive men in turbans. He kept telling us that the shop keeper had promised to buy school books for his many children upon delivery of foreigners to his jewellery store, and that if we did not go into the shop, located in an unspecified part of a nearby derelict tower block, his children would be deprived of an education.

The conversation was rather cyclical and went something like this.

You go jewellery store. I get books for my children. Yes. My children go to school. [3 taps on my forearm]

No, we’re not going into the shop. Please drive on.

You buy, you no buy, I get books for my children’s school. You go to shop. You do this for [tap] the [tap] children [tap] Yes.

No. No shopping. Please drive.

I refugee. I from Afghanistan. My children need books. You go shop. Good jewellery. [tap] Great price [tap]. You shop [tap].

After about ten minutes of this, I told him to either drive on or let us leave the tuk tuk. As he had little idea where the dance school was, judging by the amount of time the taxi wallah had spent giving him directions, and disappointed at his inability to convince us to shop till we dropped, he told us to get out. We got into another tuk tuk, which happened to be nearby, and sped off into the dusk.

The second tuk tuk, driven by two teenagers who claimed to be university students, turned off the highway, careered through some dimly lit side streets, travelling at a speed that left us quite shaken. I wondered suspiciously if they were in cahoots with the first tuk tuk driver, and if we were about to be robbed down a dark alley. As it turned out, they didn’t try to rob us, or even sell us anything. They appeared to be what they said they were; two university students in a borrowed tuk tuk taking advantage of a Sunday to earn some extra cash.

Not everyone was out to get me, but I couldn’t tell those who were from those who weren’t. It was to be a problem throughout the holiday. India makes you paranoid. We got to the dance school a little shaken, waited on a musty sofa in a large hall to see the "Traditional Dances of India" show. It was less touristic than it sounds, but also less interesting than it could have been. The dancers were teenage dance students, didn’t seem too enthusiastic about performing in front of a dozen or so foreigners.

In their defence, they were also being asked to perform dances typical of different regions of India, probably an impossibility. Imagine asking a dancer in Europe to start off with an Irish jig, then switch to some Morris dancing, and finish off with a flamenco. In any case, the musicians, especially the tabla drummer, were really good, so I shouldn’t complain. The thing is, I simply can’t stop complaining, and if you’ve got this far in my travel diary, you already know this. I should also warn you, that I have no intention of stopping! It is the duty of every writer to report both good and bad.

A few hours later, back in Connaught Square and about to go into an excellent restaurant called The Embassy, a con man, somehow successfully impersonating the taxi driver who had brought us from the airport, convinced us to get into a tuk tuk with him on the pretence of showing us something or other. He drove us half way across the city to some decrepit travel agent he insisted was the official government tourist office. I know this seems incredible, and looking back at it we cannot really understand how it happened either. It is worth analysing, as the same elements may hold true for many scams, which do not, as is commonly believed, always take advantage of the greed and dishonesty of the victim.

Scams and Scamming Rules of Engagement

I will go ahead with the scam analysis and try to extrapolate general features of scams.

– Surprise the "mark"

As in military matters, a successful attack is more likely if the enemy can be surprised. A man caught off guard is much easier to trip up. Our conman came out of nowhere. As we turned a corner, he was there waiting for us, a smiling ambusher.

– Feign a relationship

Humans have an inherent distrust of strangers, so conmen must never appear to be strangers. Our conman had his hand outstretched and seemed to know us. Moreover, proffering one’s hand instigates physical contact, and once physical contact has been made, I think it becomes more difficult to disentangle oneself from a situation. This could be why politicians are so keen to shake hands.

– Build the relationship

The stronger a relationship between two people, the more likely one person is to be influenced by another. It is for this reason that conmen spend so much time and effort building a relationship before moving in for the kill. Our conman claimed to be our taxi driver from the airport pick-up, arranged through the hotel. He also claimed that his brother worked as a receptionist in our hotel. You may wonder, as we did afterwards, how he managed to successfully impersonate the taxi driver. My only answer is the power of suggestion, and the fact that we only really saw the back of the taxi driver’s head for most of the journey; the back of one man’s head looks pretty much like another’s.

– Guide the conversation

A conversation, if left to its own devices, would be unlikely to move towards the conman’s pitch. However, the conman must avoid suspicion and not be too direct. He cannot, for example, say: Now I want to talk about the product I am going to try and sell you later. Instead, he must gently guide the conversation to this end. Our conman asked us how we were enjoying Delhi, what we had seen, and what we intended to see. In reality, of course, he had no interest in our opinion of Delhi, and was merely fishing for information to be able to refine the "pitch" later on.

– Mask the "pitch"

Just as a pyramid scheme scammer will never tell the victim that he is trying to get him to invest in a pyramid scheme, so our conman could not let us know he wanted to get us into a travel agent to get a kickback. Instead, he highlighted, in general terms, the importance of having independent and trustworthy information. He warned us about unscrupulous touts who might give us untrustworthy information. He stressed, in an apparently disinterested manner, the advisability of going to the official Government Tourist Agency.

– Slowly reel in the "mark"

I believe there comes a key moment in every scam in which the victim is asked to do something he later cannot justify doing, a compromising action which brings the victim a lot closer to the conman’s objective, after which escape becomes more difficult. In our case, it was getting into a tuk tuk with the con man and a tuk tuk driver, who had mysteriously appeared from nowhere, in order to be shown where the official government tourist agency was exactly. We tried not to take this step; it was already night time, and we wanted to go to a restaurant. In hindsight, I cannot understand why I did not labour this point, but I didn’t. The conman used the relationship he had built up previously to stress that he was only doing this to help his brother, the receptionist in our hotel, to ensure we had a pleasant stay in India, and did not fall prey to unscrupulous sharks. He also stressed the shortness of the journey.

Distract the "mark"

The journey was not five minutes, as promised, but nearer twenty, and it brought us into an insalubrious part of town I do not know the name of. To distract us, the conmen tried to discuss Indian society, stressing the problems of poverty and inequality. He deftly changed the subject whenever I enquired about the unexpected length of the journey. It was here that his scheme began to unravel. I happened to know that the real government tourist agency was in Connaught Square, and I also knew we were no longer anywhere near Connaught Square. All confidence tricks rely to a greater or lesser extent on the ignorance of the victim. Information is power. Although I possessed the information, I was not yet in a powerful enough position to control the situation. I mean, one cannot simply jump out of a speeding tuk tuk, and try as I might, I could not control the direction of the conversation, or the direction of the tuk tuk.

– Pressurise the "mark" and sell the "pitch"

We were eventually delivered to a grotty travel agent down a rubbish-strewn back street. The conman tried to convince us that this was the official Government Tourist Office, and that once we stepped inside, irrefutable proof of this would be provided. The door was opened, people were waving us in, someone was pointing at a part of a sign that said "government", and the entire street was willing us into the shop. The amount of pressure exercised on the victim, I believe, increases and decreases throughout a scam, but it is always most intense at key moments like this. For the conman, this was the make or break. The sequence of scamming is summarised below.

Getting out of the Scam

I knew at this point that we were being scammed. The question was now how to get out of it. I considered simply walking away and calling him a cheat, a crook and a liar, but I had no idea where I was, I had no idea who the people around me were, and more importantly, I had no idea what relationships existed between the conman and the many undesirables in the darkened street. I needed to somehow turn the tables, to put the conman on the defensive.

Desperate to close the deal, the conman again tried to stress the relationship he had built up earlier, and that he was simply doing his brother and us, a favour. It was at this point that I destroyed his pitch. I demanded to know precisely what hotel his brother worked at, i.e. which hotel he had supposedly dropped us off at. He tried to change the subject, but I held firm. He was, of course, unable to name our hotel.

We stormed off, anxious to exploit our advantage before he could regroup and sell a revised pitch. We reached a relatively well lit main street; he followed us in the tuk tuk, insisting there had been some kind of misunderstanding and promising to bring us back to Connaught Square, free of charge. At one point we were walking down the middle of the road, cars whizzing by in both directions, horns tooting, and the tuk tuk a few metres away – the conman, like a shark, refusing to let go of its prey, believing he could bring us down with just one more bite. Only when we hung around near some police guys at a corner that he finally let us go and disappeared into the night.

It was not the first or last time someone tried to scam us in India. However, it was the nearest anyone came to actually doing it. From that moment on, I trusted no one, I believed nothing, and I never spoke to strangers. It meant cutting myself off from over one billion people, but I saw no other way of getting through the journey.

Migraine Misery

I don’t know if it was the stress of all these tout wars, the heat, the change in diet, or just culture shock, but on my second night in Delhi, I had a massive migraine attack. All light caused pain – the stronger the light, the greater the pain. Noise became painful too, and I mean physically painful, not just unpleasant. As the migraine progressed, it spread to the rest of my body. Cold sweats kicked in after the third or fourth hour; I tossed and turned. Nausea and dizziness took hold in hour five, and every inch of me seemed to be competing with itself to see which part of it could cause the most pain. The crescendo of pain came in hours six and seven when nausea was replaced by vomiting, when my stomach was empty, then retching. By this stage, I just wanted the pain to stop. I woke up the next morning with the happiest of glows; the pain, which had seemed so permanent, had mysteriously vanished.

Surrendering to Luxury

I had only been in India for two days, but it felt as though I’d been there months. I felt like I was a raw recruit, dumped in the middle of a war zone; exhausted, shell shocked, and running low on ammunition. I needed help. That help came in the form of a man called Raju, who we hired as a driver for the next twelve days, to take us around Agra and all over Rajasthan in north western India. We had only gone into the travel agent, Kumar, on the recommendation of our guidebook, to ask about the price of a one-way taxi to Agra, but had come out with a driver for 12 days, all accommodations booked and a one-way plane ticket from Udaipur to Mumbai.

That’s what shops are like in India. Never go into one you have no idea what they are going to convince you to buy. They possess occult powers of persuasion which innocent westerners are powerless to resist. I had never imagined I would hire a driver, thinking myself an independent traveller: a user of public transport; a man who hauls his own bags; a man of the people. When luxury was dangled in front of my face at a very affordable price, with the prospect of spending the rest of the month battling armies of touts like we had done during the first two days, I plumped for luxury.

Sights of Delhi

The Red Fort, dating from 1639, is a physical demonstration of the zenith of Mughal power in India. I was surprised to find how great the Muslim influence had been on northern India. Even the Taj Mahal is an Islamic structure, and most of the sights in northern India were also very much in the Mughal architectural style, rather than of Hindu origin.

The Mughals, one of the great Islamic empires, swept east from Persia and came to control much of northern India, from the sixteenth century until the British Raj took the reigns of power in the nineteenth century. The fort is a massive structure, with an imposing red sandstone wall that stretches for 2.5 kilometres, and reaches 60 metres in height in parts. This fort city was the epicentre of Shah Jahan’s new capital city, which he modestly named after himself, Shahjahanabad. He was the same shah who built the Taj Mahal. However, he never quite completed the move from the former capital Agra, because he was deposed by his own son, Aurangzeb, a religious zealot, who sowed the seeds for the later decline of the Mughals.

The fort used to house thousands of people, but the British evicted them following the India mutiny of 1857, and deposed the last of the Mughals, who had unwisely agreed to be a figurehead for the rebellion. The British turned the fort into their own military base, building some truly hideous barracks that still scar the fort today. We saw the fort early in the morning in drizzle and sandals, ignoring the dismissive glances of Indian tourists, who didn’t seem to notice the drizzle.

A large and immaculately groomed park, this must be a very soothing place to visit in the winter. However, as the mid-afternoon sun burnt through the morning clouds and set the ground steaming, it felt like being in an open-air sauna. My clothes became wet with sweat, as we tried to admire a simple black marble platform which marks the spot were Ghandi was cremated following his assassination in 1948. My eyes were red and I had to hold back the tears, not through emotion, but because my mosquito spray and suntan lotion were running down into my eyes from my soaking eyebrows. I thought about how uncomfortable it must be for women who wear make-up, which is probably something few people consider when staring at Ghandi’s memorial.

The park is a memorial not only to Ghandi, but also to three other great Indian leaders; only one of whom, Nehru, wasn’t assassinated. Indira Ghandi, Sanjay and Rajiv went the same way as the great Mahatma, testaments to how deeply passions run in India, and how dangerous a country it is to lead.

Qutb Minar Monument Complex

Battling through the Delhi traffic for what seemed like days, our trustee driver brought us to the Qutb Minar monument complex. When we arrived, I asked him what it was, and he replied: a monument. That was as much information as I ever gleamed from Raju about anything we visited. I could see his level of English was lacking, but without knowing a word of Hindi, who was I to comment? Some internet surfing later, I learned this was a World Heritage Site marking the beginning of Islamic rule in India. The showpiece of the complex, the Qutb Minar minaret, is the largest red brick minaret in the world and reaches an amazing 73 metres, no small feat when you consider it was built in 1193.

Some of the materials in the complex were actually recycled from previous religious shrines. For example, there is a seven-metre high iron pillar, which has somehow refused to rust, probably of Hindu origin, may date back to 400 AD. I enjoyed rambling around the ruins, with the sun setting and the temperatures becoming bearable. Wild dogs were playing in the evening sun; flies were getting ready for bed.

My time in Delhi was drawing to a close. I was looking forward to exploring the immensity of India. We spent the evening in a bar with live music. I think it was called aLIVE. I don’t know if it was the quality of the music, the ample quantities of Kingfisher beer that flowed, or the thought that I wouldn’t have to get on a tuk tuk for a while, but I felt very happy.